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Think:games

There are other things going on in the world, and with this Think:games blog I just wanted to give them some perspective. Politics is not a game, and it would be unwise to pretend that it is, but in both you can win or you can lose. I started this blog to shed light on what games can teach, and here I want to talk about what games can teach about learning from your losses.

In my latest blog post, I’ve finally covered something else than philosophy, and this Reading the game article will do the same. Today, I will be taking a look at the general art of teamwork, and how teamwork in gaming can teach us about (and improve) teamwork in real life!

Although much has been said about recently released No Man’s Sky already, I can’t really skip it on this blog because there is simply so much to be said about it.

Let’s start with its recent release, that failed the high expectations of many and mostly caused disappointment. Developer Hello Games had promised players an infite universe to explore, with infinite amounts of different species, space-ships and planets. And that is what it gave them. Although No Man’s Sky‘s trailers gave some false impressions of what the eventual game would look like (as argued for strongly in this article), the game kept to its promise: it generates new content procedurally, so that the chances of the generated subject matter being the same in two different playthroughs are next to zero. This makes for lots of unique objects, but the objections many players raise is that when all of them still look like each other, they’re not unique at all. Grains of sand in the Sahara may be unique, but to humans it’s still just a desert.

I want to use this blog post to distinguish my project with Think:Games from the more widely known phenomenon of gamification. Since gamification is rising in education quickly, I thought it would be useful to emphasize the similarities and differences between the two, and give some thoughts on how they can support and complement each other.

For the third article in my Reading the game series, I will dive into one of my own favorite game franchises, Bethesda’s Fallout series. Once again, I will look at it from a philosophical angle, for the simple reason that philosophy is my own field, and I want to write some good pieces about it before I take on other classes. Also, that I covered a specific game doesn’t mean I won’t cover it again. On the contrary: there are plenty of games that allow for more than one class or even science to give it a take.

Spoiler warning: this article describes some plot elements from Fallout 4 and the entire Human Error questline. Do not read below this if you plan to play this game in the future.

Hi everyone, in my first blog post I looked at three games and their potential for education. In the next post I will look at a specific game again (No Man’s Sky), but first I want to cover something of more tangible use in a classroom. This is partly to stress that this is not a game blog: I want to provide as much tools and materials as I can for actual teachers in actual classes. So please let me know your opinions on whether that is working or not, so I can change my course as I write! Now, let’s get into it.

If you are unfamiliar with it: Socrative is a web and mobile app that allows you to interact with a classroom in various ways. You can ask questions, do quizzes, review students’ work, hold competitions and lots more. During my Master’s (for philosophy education), Socrative was praised as a particularly useful tool to monitor class activities as well as improving quality and quantity of interactions with students. The only downside is that it requires every student to have a device that the application can work on, but when that is the case, you can start using it right away.

Hi everyone, with this post I’m kicking off the blog series. In short, I’ll be going over recent developments in gaming and education, new games that I see educational potential in and other relevant actualities.

The Turing Test
Let’s start off then with a brand new release. The Turing Test is a puzzle game that revolves around the differences between machines and humans, and brings up many questions about personal identity, consciousness, ethics and since it’s a puzzle game, it involves plenty of logical and analytical thinking. This is of course philosophy from start to finish, and promises to be not just a thorough thought excercise, but a good starting point for philosophical discussion as well.